Rick Santorum has now joined the illustrious company of Pamela Geller, Jerome Corsi, and Joseph Farah, and is writing a regular column for one of the looniest wingnut sites on the web, the always inadvertently amusing World Net Daily, where they’re still totally certain that Barack Obama is a secretly gay radical Muslim atheist commie with a fake birth certificate.

Not a single one of those absurd adjectives is exaggerated. The people who write for this hive of lunacy really do believe that stuff, all of it, at the same time. Not to mention the creationism, the advocation of theocracy, the climate change denial, the insane raving homophobia, and the blatant nativism and racism. It’s a cornucopia of anti-rational far right kookery.

And Santorum’s first column for Weird Nuts Drooling fits right in; it’s a crazy rant about a United Nations treaty on the rights of disabled people that Santorum thinks is a secret conspiracy to subvert the US Constitution so they can kill his daughter.

Digging a bit deeper, the treaty has much darker and more troubling implications.

The most offensive provision is found in Section 7 of the treaty dealing specifically with children with disabilities. That section reads:

“In all actions concerning children with disabilities, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”

“The best interest of the child” standard is lifted out of a controversial provision contained in the 1989 treaty called the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. That treaty was never ratified in large part because of this provision.

“The best interest of the child” standard may sound like it protects children, but what it does is put the government, acting under U.N. authority, in the position to determine for all children with disabilities what is best for them. That is counter to the current state of the law in this country which puts parents – not the government – in that position of determining what is in their child’s best interest. Under the laws of our country, parents lose that right only if the state, through the judicial process, determines that the parents are unfit to make that decision.

In the case of our 4-year-old daughter, Bella, who has Trisomy 18, a condition that the medical literature says is “incompatible with life,” would her “best interest” be that she be allowed to die? Some would undoubtedly say so.

Oh, for Pete’s sake.

Should somebody let Rick Santorum know that the Supreme Court has ruled on numerous occasions that the Supremacy Clause says treaties like this one cannot supersede the US Constitution, or is it too funny to just let him keep ranting away?

It’s very illuminating to see Republicans like Santorum losing their shit over an overwhelmingly positive treaty that would greatly help the disabled people of the world; makes it very easy to see that gaping cavity in their chests where a heart is supposed to be.